Göteborg Carnival Spirit on Record

Claire Tancons
AnarKrew:
An Anti-Archives
Göteborg Carnival Spirit on Record
Sonia Boyce (UK, 1962) Andreas Gedin (Sweden, 1958) Nicoline van Harskamp (the Netherlands, 1975) Johan Heintz (Sweden, 1953) Jean-Louis Huhta (Sweden, 1965) Deimantas Narkevičius (Lithuania, 1964) New Beauty Council & MYCKET (Sweden, est. 2008/2011) Roberto Peyre (Sweden, 1971) Psychic Warfare (Sweden, est. 2010) Karol Radziszewski (Poland, 1980) Per Zennström & Lennart Sjöberg (Sweden, 1961/1961)
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AnarKrew: An Anti-Archives
Göteborg Carnival Spirit on Record
By Claire Tancons
109
Stockholm is burning. Sweden is on fire. The
Swedish model is under scrutiny, if not in
jeopardy. So read newspapers hot off the press
in the days of the unrest that allegedly began
with the police killing of an elderly immigrant
in the Stockholm suburb of Husby on Sunday,
May 19, 2013. In scenes reminiscent of similar
occurrences across Europe over the last decade,
most iconic among them the 2005 Paris Fall and
the 2011 London Summer, groups of first generation Swedish-born immigrants were reported
to set the suburbs of Sweden’s capital city
ablaze. Whether in Husby, Clichy (Paris suburb)
or Hackney (London borough), the death of
immigrants at the hands of the police triggered
civil unrest usually referred to as urban riots. 1
In Göteborg in June 2001, protests against the
EU and EU-US summits ended rather than began with the shooting, in the back, of a 19-yearold Swedish national, Hannes Westberg, by the
Swedish riot police, during a Reclaim the Street
party on Vasaplatsen. The young anti-corporate
globalization activist was not of immigrant
background—other than the migratory path his
forebears likely followed like most populations
during millennia of human migration. What then,
beyond the youth factor, might ally Swedish
nationals of Swedish and immigrant descent in
the country’s cities and suburbs during these
related, though distinct, manifestations of
opposition against the state and its police force?
What if the youth despite difference in class,
1
At the time of writing this paper, the name of the immigrant
who was killed, the circumstances of his death, and the
relationship between his death and the unrest hadn’t been
fully established. Elderly (69), of Portuguese descent, and
long established in Sweden (thirty years), the profile of this
Swedish citizen contrasts with that of Mark Duggan, the
29-year-old black Briton—not exactly an immigrant, but
rather the descendant of Afro-Caribbean former British colonial subjects—whose killing by the police at a traffic stop
ethnic, economic, and religious backgrounds
might be led by a common instinct to scrape
away at the so-called Swedish model?
What does the Swedish model look like from
Göteborg in the first place? Göteborg, like
other Swedish cities, was marked by postwar efforts to contain the discontents of the
industrial decline and incipient migratory waves,
initially from impoverished or politically unstable
neighboring European countries (Eastern and
Southern Europe in steady flows since the
1960s), later from global warfare zones (Latin
American political refugees in the 1970s and
Middle Eastern and East African asylum seekers
in the 1990s), and as a result of the deregulated
labor market (Southeast Asian berry pickers for
the last decade). In a historical narrative that has
become customary, the latter populations came
in to escape the ripple effects of geopolitical
turmoil or were brought in to replace the former
to perform work that had become undesirable,
could be compensated less, or simply needed
more labor than the national work force could
handle. Whether the native jobless dockers
of old or the laid-off immigrant Volvo factory
workers of new, they where simultaneously
driven away from, or never allowed into central
housing, and relocated, or settled on the
outskirts of the city. The Million Dwellings
Program (1965–1974) has become emblematic
of a politics that, in Göteborg, began with the
destruction of the inner city working class Haga
sparked the London unrest, and with that of 15-year-old
Bouna Traoré and 17-year-old Zyed Benna, of African and
North African descent respectively, who died by electrocution while being chased by the police in a Parisian suburb,
sparking the unrest there.
2 The Million Dwellings Program is the name of the near
decade-long housing program carried out by the Swedish
Social Democratic party to increase Sweden’s housing
and Masthugget neighborhoods and continued
with the resettlement of its working class population, later followed by immigrant populations,
in the Angered suburb. 2 As the Million Dwellings
Program areas are undergoing gentrification,
further population displacements await even
as the city center expands, always, alas, at the
expense of Swedish nationals of immigrant
background not recognized as part of model
national construction schemes.
Party thieves and urban incendiaries
Göteborg’s city center was hardly the place
where these Swedish populations of diverse
backgrounds, so close yet so far (a couple
of tramway stops away), could meet. Yet, in
the mid-1980s an event of unprecedented
dimensions (but not without antecedent or
untraceable genealogy) brought them together. ​
The circumstances under which I came to
discover the existence of this event, from which
AnarKrew: An Anti-Archives originates, bear
narrating as they epitomize the demise of a
model based upon privilege for the majority
native-born Swedes, segregation for the minority immigrants to Sweden (a large one at an
estimated 15% of the population) and the myth
of multiculturalism for all. Not unsurprisingly,
the story of my discovery begins with individuals who have a doubly distinct background,
through their activities and their ancestry, and a
connection with this event. When they still lived
stock by one million new dwellings. The outcome of
housing policies aimed at solving the ever-growing overcrowding problem due to the decay of older housing on
the one hand and population migration on the other hand,
the program, though it did exceed its initial numerical goal
of a million new dwellings, is by now widely recognized as
having polarized the populations of Sweden’s major cities
and contributed to record levels of segregation.
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in Göteborg (they moved to Stockholm in the
early 1990s) visual artist and DJ Roberto Peyre
and DJ Jean-Louis Huhta, the former of Latin
American descent and the latter of ­Caribbean
descent, both current “members” of the
AnarKrew, participated in the Göteborg Carnival
(1982–1993). It left such a profound mark on
Roberto, then a teenager experimenting with
recreational drugs, that he credits the carnival
with making him into an artist. Jean-Louis,
already a practicing DJ, has vivid memories of
his sets for the carnival on Götaplatsen. Roberto
and Jean-Louis then led me to the carnival’s
founder, former drummer, DJ, events organizer,
and social worker Johan Heintz. A quick look at
the neatly organized yearly press clippings from
the folder Johan brought to our first meeting at
Röda Sten, the headquarters of the Göteborg
International Biennial of Contemporary Art
(GIBCA), on December 3, 2012, was enough for
me to know that there was something of momentous significance there. A couple of hours of
discussion with Johan altogether confirmed my
intuition, opened up my curiosity and fired up
my imagination. A walking tour of the former
illegal club scene of the 1980s in Haga and Masthugget led by Johan Heintz, a ferry trip headed
by Roberto Peyre on February 3, 2013, as well as
a workshop held at the Göteborg City Museum
under the auspices of Chief Curator Mats Sjölin,
organized by AnarKrew research assistant and
GIBCA intern Emma Stanisic with participants
Johan Heintz, Johan Öberg, Robin Barnholt, and
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Hannes Westberg, as well as GIBCA producer
Sarah Hansson from Göteborg and Andreas
Gedin, Roberto Peyre, Jean-Louis Huhta, Annika
Enqvist of the New Beauty ­Council and Karl
Sjölin of Psychic Warfare, provided the inaugural
meeting and original members of the AnarKrew. 3
Carnival in Göteborg—until I met Roberto and
Jean-Louis and spoke with Johan—meant a folk
festival taking place in Hammarkullen, a section
of the Angered housing project. When I went
to the Hammarkullen Carnival (1974– ) in the
spring of 2012, I began considering, politically
incorrect though it may be, replacing the notion
of folk festival with that of freak show, so strong
was the feeling of alienation I was immediately
immersed in the minute I stepped off the tram.
It emerged not so much from being faced with
a poster series showing the transformation of
a young, assumedly Caucasian, woman into a
carnival creature of indeterminate ethnicity by
way of make-up, costume, and other adornment. 4 Rather, it manifested on this aesthetics
of transformation, playing up tropes of a warm
multiculturalism, being confronted with the cold,
vertical, and sterile landscape of Hammarkullen
upon emerging from the subterranean station.
Robin Barnholdt has written about the influence
of the Million Dwellings Program urban plan and
architectural model on socialization, including,
through the carnival, among immigrants in
Hammarkullen. If the notion of folk festival
holds when considering immigrants socializing
3 Catharina Thörn, Göran Dalhberg, and Linn Hansén
were also invited but unable to attend. All three were
instrumental in the development of this project at different
stages as is noted further on in this essay.
4 The term ”Caucasian” is used here in its old and largely accepted use that includes populations ranging from Europe,
Western Asia, and parts of India and North Africa, rather
than the more recent restrictive approximation with white
skin color.
with each other, that of freak show sets in when
analyzing the relationship between residents in
and visitors to Hammarkullen during the carnival.
The performance of the gaze from the Göteborg
onlooker onto the Hammarkullen spectacle inscribes the phenomenon of exclusion within this
segregated landscape even as it tries to ascribe
to it the rhetoric of diversity in the space of
the Hammarkullen Carnival within which urban
Afro-Swedes and downtown hipsters try to mix
with Somali teenagers and Turkish families as I
witnessed on May 25, 2012.
The relationship between the unrest in the
suburbs of France, the UK, and Sweden was
swiftly established by a group of British
and Swedish academics from such fields as
sociology, urban studies, and cultural studies
including Paul Gilroy (who had already been
involved in debates about the 2011 London
unrests) and Les Blank from the University of
London, as well as ­Catharina Thörn and Ove
Sernhede from the University of Göteborg. In
a June 1 article published in the Stockholm
daily Svenska Dagbladet they asked for the
establishment of a Husby Committee modeled
after the Göteborg Committee for the 2001
riots to investigate the structural rather than
causal circumstances of the unrest—or simply
confirm the prior diagnosis of “structural
dissemination” and “territorial stigmatization” (Loic Wacquant). They further wrote of
learning “lessons from Göteborg” in matters
of mediation with youth organizations such as
Pantrarna (The Panthers). 5
Following the Husby Committee’s analysis
of Sweden’s contemporary social circumstances, I suggest that Göteborg epitomizes
“socially segregated urban environments
where a deep social inequality has taken on a
spatial expression in the form of a divided city.”
I further advance that the carnival phenomenon in Göteborg acts as a further revealing
factor of the city’s condition. In an earlier and
unprecedented sociological survey of Göteborg
called (Re)-searching Gothenburg featuring
Husby Committee members Catharina Thörn,
Håkan Thörn, and Ove Sernhede among others
and published by Glänta Produktion in 2010,
neither the Hammarkullen nor the Göteborg
Carnivals were taken into consideration. Essays
focusing on a variety of aspects, including one
specifically about the so-called “Göteborg
events” of 2001 and about other civil disobedience actions such as those of the so-called
“Asphalt Indians” or traffic protesters of 2007,
as well as the darker undercurrents of Sweden’s
repressed, if short-lived, colonial enterprises,
did, however, abound. The missing link between
social unrest and carnival is one that AnarKrew
in collaboration with Glänta, in a special issue
about spatial politics co-edited by Glänta
editors Linn Hansén and Göran Dahlberg and
myself address, not so much as a redress of the
2010 book as much as a fresh new assessment
of heretofore submerged cultural patterns.
5 Husby-kommission krävs för djup analys, Svenska Dagbladet, June 1, 2013
http://www.svd.se/opinion/brannpunkt/husby-kommissionkravs-for-djup-analys_8230682.svd
112
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The unarticulated relationship between the
Göteborg Carnival of the mid-1980s and 1990s
and the Göteborg protests of the early 2000s,
however, is nowhere made more manifest and
self-evident as in the friendship between Johan
Heintz, the Carnival’s founder, and Hannes
Westberg, the protest’s accidental symbol;
both—as far as I can tell from an outsider’s perspective—rather contested, if not controversial
figures, finding refuge in a club scene (Heintz
was and Westberg is, a DJ) that though being
now mostly legal still remains largely marginal.
“Kalastjuvar” (Party Thieves), an essay by Ina
Lundström published in Faktum, the homeless
monthly, had, earlier this year, uncovered the
mechanism by which the city, through constant
harassment of the Carnival, had maneuvered
to condemn it to closure only to resurrect a
sanitized and securitized, anti-fun version of it
with the Göteborg Kalaset. 6 What will stop the
city from further stealing its cultural scene and
igniting new urban fires?
Spatial imaginaries of protest sensibilities
and heterotopic exhibitionary spaces
In the seminal Carnival Rogues and Heroes: An
Interpretation of the Brazilian Dilemma (1979)
Brazilian anthropologist Roberto DaMatta
divides carnivals into two main categories:
carnivals of hierarchy and carnivals of equality.
Applying this classification onto Göteborg’s
carnivals, I would argue that the ongoing
6 http://www.faktum.nu/2012/10/kalastjuvar
7
See Claire Tancons, ”The Greatest Free Show on Earth:
Carnival from Trinidad to Brazil, Cape Town to New
Orleans,” in Prospect.1 catalogue (New York: PICTUREBOX,
2008), 46.
http://www.academia.edu/1054626/The_Greatest_Free_Show_on_
Earth_Carnival_from_Trinidad_to_Brazil_Cape_Town_to_New_Orleans
Hammarkullen carnival is, along with the New
Orleans and, as I have argued elsewhere, Cape
Town carnivals, a carnival of hierarchy, whereas
the Göteborg carnival was a carnival of equality. 7
While the former continues to reinforce the
spatial segregation of the city by confining its
immigrant population in the suburbs, the latter
attempted instead to equalize the field by
merging both urban and suburban populations
in the city center, creating, as did the peaceful
protests of 2001, and as the worldwide occupation movements do since 2011, what American
anarchist Peter Lamborn Wilson aka Hakim
Bey famously termed a temporary autonomous
zone. 8 “Counter-space” is the term used by
Göteborg University’s Matthias Wahlström in
his analysis of “‘The Göteborg events’ 2001” in
an eponymous essay published in the aforementioned book (Re)-searching Gothenburg,
following Henri Lefebvre’s assertion that “space
is not given—it is always produced in tensions
between various forces.’ 9 According to Catharina
Thörn, an important early adviser to this project,
writing about the Stockholm uprising, the death
of Swedish social democracy was precipitated
by “the restructuring of urban spatial and social
relations.” 10 Certainly then, a mending of such
strayed social fabric can take place through
repossessing space—indeed, reclaiming the
streets.
Taking the archives of the forgotten Göteborg
Carnival as a starting point and the so-called
8 See Claire Tancons, ”Occupy Wall Street: Carnival Against
Capital? Carnivalesque as Protest Sensibility,” e-flux
journal #30, December 2011.
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/occupy-wall-street-carnival-againstcapital-carnivalesque-as-protest-sensibility
9 Matthias Walhström, “‘The Gothenburg Events’” 2001: The
City as Counter-Space” in (Re)searching Gothenburg:
Essays on a Changing City, ed. Helena Holgersson et al.
(Göteborg: Glänta Produktion 2010), 225.
“Göteborg Riots” as a temporary closure,
AnarKrew: An Anti-Archives sets out on an
undocumented journey into Göteborg’s counterculture and its wider ramifications across
Northern Europe. AnarKrew is thus a study of
the spatial imaginaries of protest sensibilities,
an exercise in heterotopic exhibitionary spaces
whereby indoor and outdoor spaces within and
without Götaplatsen, down Kungsportsavenyn,
onto Esperantoplatsen, along the canal and in
the vicinity of the port itself, are mobilized to
reflect upon the potential of art in altering sensory perception and inspiring new socio-political
manifestations about being in the world. The
world of AnarKrew then occupies the memorial
spaces long left vacant until the recovery of
­Johan Heintz’s private archives of the ­Göteborg
Carnival, destabilizes the institutional spaces of
Göteborgs Konsthall and the Project Room at the
Hasselblad Center, subverts the threateningly
sanitized sidewalks of Avenyn with Peyre’s
Lovamen, the New Beauty Council and Mycket’s
love floats, Jean-Louis Huhta’s sound system
and Psychic Warfare’s Psychic Attack on an
as-yet unspecified target, as well as sexualizes
its dispassionate shop windows with Karol
Radziszewski’s video installations.
Claiming a geo-psychic territory that encompasses both institutional and interstitial spaces
to conduct official activities with, at times, a
frisson of illegality, AnarKrew seeks to establish
a dialogical relationship between artificially
10 Catharina Thörn provided generous information about
Göteborg’s social landscape and urban map since our first
meeting over a year ago on May 29, 2012, through e-mail
correspondance, another meeting, and a walking tour of
Haga in December 2012.
See Catharina Thörn, ”The Stockholm Uprising and
the Myth of Swedish Social Democracy” in New Left
Project, May 30, 2013.
http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/print_article/the_
stockholm_uprising_and_the_myth_of_swedish_social_democracy
separate (segregated) spaces and disparate
(distanced) modes of knowledge production to
create an integrated exhibitionary complex that
counters biopolitical manifestations ranging
from obfuscation to oblivion. The notion of
the geo-psychic, a New Orleans anarchist
vernacular version of the better-known
psychogeographic Situationist notion as well
as the Foucauldian heritage of the heterotopic
and the Bakhtinian frame of the dialogical allow
for a dynamic spatiotemporal production of
knowledge as commemoration, anticipation,
prefiguration, and, even, preemption of possible
futures. Historical elisions include the ­Göteborg
Carnival, forgotten or denied depending on
the viewpoint, and the starting point of the
journey of the AnarKrew. For AnarKrew, a
play on words between “anarchy” and “crew”
or “krewe,” identifies the pirate ship crew (of
proto-anarchist lore; cf. once again Hakim Bey
in “Pirate Utopias”) and the carnival krewe
(cf. the New Orleans Mardi Gras) as proximate
anarchists, as the boat is to the float. Setting
out on an investigative journey that reinvents
the origins of the city of Göteborg in carnival,
and of carnival at sea based on the contested
etymology carrus navalis (chariot of the sea
rather than carne levare or farewell to the
flesh, the commonly accepted etymology of
“carnival” which finds its myth of origin in Latin
rather than the Nordic countries), AnarKrew
straddles historical, fictional, and mythological
narrative modes.
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Navigating the confluences between the maritime imaginary, carnivalesque strategies, and
anarchist influences constitutive of the protest
ethos of the city of Göteborg, AnarKrew is thus
a vessel operating, as per the Venetian saying,
“Par tera e par mar,” with the artists and the
project’s collaborators as its crew. Among those
not yet introduced in this text are Bakhtinian
Andreas Gedin whose Driftwood carries with it
erasures past and transgressions present, death
at sea and bones unburied. Gedin’s installation
at Göteborg Konsthall brings together island
folklore about sailors lured ashore and killed,
their ships plundered, the history of drifting
corpses of World War II soldiers shipped between Norway and Germany around the islands
near Göteborg and the recent news story of the
trial of a sect ringleader using said island bones
in macabre sexual rituals. His contribution
to the outdoor event on the preview opening
day of the biennial (September 6) down at the
port will involve a reverse (carnivalesque) key
throwing ritual wherein the lock, rather than
the key, will be thrown into the sea to find the
key, presumably already thrown into the water
at the harbor. A reversed ritual that speaks of
inclusion and exclusion, it was inspired by the
eighteenth-century wooden cabinet preserved
in the City Museum that was said to hold the
keys to the city during a time when the city
gates of Göteborg were kept locked at night.
Gedin’s project speaks to the incipient idea of
the AnarKrew that seeks to address ­Göteborg’s
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dual relationship with the world through the
complex web of its maritime history, colonial
enterprises, immigration policies, multicultural
rhetoric, and gentrification plans using carnival
as a metaphor of both inclusion and exclusion. Indeed, up until the nineteenth century,
Göteborg was both a part of and apart from the
world. As a port city, Göteborg was part of a
commercial network connecting China, Africa
and the Caribbean by way of Guangzhou, Cape
Town, and St. Barthélemy. As a military town
Göteborg parted from the world every night
when its entrances and exits were locked only
to be reopened the following morning at the
Great and Small Booms and the Queen’s, King’s,
and Carl’s Gates respectively.
Following closely in Gedin’s wake is Roberto
Peyre’s Lovaman performance beginning along
the canal and at the Lion’s Mouth. Canoeing
with a small crew, Peyre reintroduces old Nordic
mythology into a wider and indeed worldwide
ritualistic cosmogony. The “men of leaves” will be
dressed in primal costumes made of aspen leaves
whose smell when fresh, and sound when dry,
have long been said to be portentous of mysteries
to be decoded only by those wise enough to be
initiated into them. “Lovaportals” on Avenyn and
at Göteborgs Konsthall might also provide thresholds through which to enter these liminal spaces
of initiation that could become the procession on
Avenyn and the exhibition at the Konsthall. There,
Peyre—a self-proclaimed Atlanticist who feels at
home in the company of Hakim Bey’s fabled pirates—will present his Ship of Fools video as the
culmination of decade-long research into carnivals from Jacmel, Haiti, to Calabar, Nigeria, on all
three American, African, and European shores of
the Atlantic, retracing a colonial itinerary in which
Sweden was late to take part, but which lasted
long enough to fuel an imaginary of otherness
that can be traced into current multicultural and
xenophobic trends at the same time. 11
Leaving behind his boat upon making landfall,
Peyre will be joined by Jean-Louis Huhta’s float,
a sound system mounted on a flatbed truck from
which Peyre and Huhta will link Göteborg’s tangible maritime heritage, indeed, the sea itself, to
its preserved maritime imaginary in such monumental statuary as the Poseidon on Götaplatsen.
Can Huhta’s performance along the city’s central
artery, a throwback to his earlier years as DJ for
the Göteborg Carnival, lend credence to the idea
of a Nordic alternative to the Latin celebration?
Will Huhta’s marooning restore Avenyn as the
civic space too long stolen by commercial and
real-estate interests, only ever but temporarily
reclaimed during protests too often curbed by
police violence or failed citizen’s own policing?
Could Huhta’s grand finale around Götaplatsen’s
sea god be perceived by graduating high school
students who circled around the statue some
months earlier as not just merry-making but also
community-making beyond the safe harbor of
their homes?
11 See Mikela Lundahl, ”The Simple Gothenburger,” 95-101
and Klas Rönnbäck ”The French Block and the Swedish
Hunt for Colonies,” 177-83 both in Helena Holgersson et al.
(Re)searching Gothenburg, op. cit.
On Esperantoplatsen, artist-activist collectives
The New Beauty Council (NBC) and Mycket in
collaboration with costume designer Maja Gunn
will stage a tableau vivant to retrace the history,
forgotten like that of the Göteborg Carnival, of
the Göteborg queer scene. This is an attempt
at filling the gap of the seeming absence
of the queer in the Göteborg Carnival—an
oddity since the carnivalesque has long been
a strategy of sexual transgression and gender
subversion as well as an instrument of activism
as in the case of both NBC and Mycket. Joining
in on Huhta’s float with Peyre, collective members Thérèse Kristiansson and Annika Enqvist
of NBC, and Mariana Alves and Katharina
­Bonnevier of ­Mycket will ride up Avenyn to the
Konsthall where they will place costumes and
props used in the tableau vivant back into the
maze installed in the main gallery space as a
disorienting device designed to confuse our
senses even as it attempts to make sense of
reinvented histories, forgotten or repressed,
neglected or denied.
At the Konsthall, an additional cast composed
of artists Deimantas Narkevičius, Sonia Boyce,
and Nicoline van Harskamp will bring further
historical depth to the remapped and revamped
history of 1980s and 1990s countercultural
­Göteborg particularly as they delved into
Heintz’s archives and, in the case of the first
two, actively collaborated with him for the
making of their new commissioned work.
116
Building upon such projects as Whatever You
Play, It Sounds Like the 1940s (2009) and End
of Censored Cinema Again and Again (2011),
Narkevičius’ new work for AnarKrew will recreate the experiential feel of the illegal club scene
of 1980s Göteborg with a light and sonic display
channeled through the by now outdated technological equipment of the time. Boyce’s new
film MOVE remaps events during the EU-US
summit protests in Göteborg in 2001, staging
DJ battles and inventing choreographies to create new memories and chart alternative territories of resistance from within the continuously
streaming energies of the city. For AnarKrew
van Harskamp reopens Yours in Solidarity
(2011– ), the filmed enactment, with actors, of
the correspondence between Dutch anarchist
Karl Max Kreuger and his worldwide network of
fellow anarchists. The Swedish chapter of Yours
in Solidarity presented at Göteborgs Konsthall
locates Göteborg’s ethos of contestation within
a larger European context nurtured by radical
political theory. Next door at the Project Room
of the Hasselblad Center a new commissioned
series of portraits by ­Radziszewski will respond
to a display of Heintz’s archives curated in
collaboration with Hasselblad Center curator
Dragana Vujanovic. Inspired by the expressions
on the faces of Göteborg Carnival participants,
specifically in the difference of expressions
between the painted and unpainted faces,
­Radziszewski’s photographs attempt a contemporary rendition of a carnivalesque portrait
117
of the city’s inhabitants, hinting maybe at a
possible carnival revival.
Göteborg spirit:
Between conciliation and contestation
What if the Göteborg spirit, rather than being
one of conciliation, was instead one of contestation? Neither conciliatory politics nor incendiary
theatrics, the Göteborg spirit activated in
AnarKrew through an anti-archiving methodology that makes use of the material remnants
of memory to fire up imaginary territories and
chart alternative itineraries, is neither bent on
parochialism nor sold out to globalism. Rather it
emanates the promises of its founding premises,
of fluid inclusions and accepted intrusions, of
canals no longer blocked and gates no longer
locked, of locks rather than keys, thrown out to
sea.
I wish to express my deep gratitude and special appreciation to Johan
Heintz for committing to this project, making his archives available,
collaborating with artists Sonia Boyce and
Deimantas Narkevičius, facilitating the work of Karol Radziszewski, being
a host to everyone and the spirit behind it all.
All documents in this section are from the personal archives of Johan Heintz.
Carnival, Götaplatsen, circa 1986–1987
Photographer unknown.
Carnival map from the Carnival Association leaflet, 1988.
“The road of Samba through the city,” GT, May 26, 1988, with reproduction of the
1988 Carnival map and photograph of Johan Heintz (Johan Berggren) and
“It’s Carnival time again in Gothenburg,” GT, Friday, May 27, 1988.
“Carnival art up the wall,” Arbetet, Tuesday May 24, 1988 with photograph
taken in Draupner, a club from the Haga neighborhood.
Façade of the Konstmuseum with banners, Götaplatsen, during cleaning
the day after Carnival, 1988. Photographer unknown.
Carnival reveler, 1989. Photographer unknown.
“Carnival Weekend,” Västerbygden, May 26, 1989.
Carnival revelers with painted and masked faces, Gustaf Adolfs Torg, 1984.
Photographer unknown.
Carnival reveler with painted face, Gustaf Adolfs Torg, 1984. Photographer unknown.
Portraits of revelers staged in front of the Konstmuseum, Götaplatsen.
Photographers Per Zennström and Lennart Sjöberg.
Dancers at the Carnival Club run by Johan Heintz. Photographer unknown.
Carnival revelers up traffic lights. “The photo was maybe taken in Copenhagen” says Heintz.
Copenhagen did also have a carnival, which Heintz visited. Photographer unknown.
“Samba starts today – Latin America in Göteborg,” Arbetet, October 6, 1984 and “Mighty Calypso,”
with a photograph of Trinidadian Calypsonian Mighty Chalkdust, Göteborgs-Posten, October 4, 1984.
“Ras Jhoe is gearing up for heavy swinging” with a photograph of Reggae singer Ras Jhoe at the
top of the page, Fredagsnöjet iDAG supplement, GT, Friday, May 10, 1991.
“Friday: At last it’s time for Carnival,” (upper left corner) and “ Carnival!: Everything you need to know from A
to Z” (lower right corner), iDAG, Friday, June 18, 1993.
“Carnival Frenzy: Soca, Salsa, Samba,” Aveny supplement, Göteborgs-Posten, June 18–24, 1993.
“Such a night…” and “The Police: It could have been worse,” GT Sunday, May 29, 1988.
“The sad downside of Carnival,” Göteborgs-Posten, 29 May, 1989.